xxii | General Introduction mainly the legislative steps that countries have taken to prohibit the use of cor- poral punishment. The Web site covers the use of corporal punishment in homes and schools as well as in the criminal justice system. Its assessments of countries are based almost entirely on whether legislation has been passed prohibiting cor- poral punishment either as a sentence in criminal justice or as a means of disci- pline in prisons. The legal situation is often ambiguous because, as with the death penalty, many countries retain the possibility of corporal punishment’s use either as a sentence or in prisons but rarely or never resort to it. Thus, there is a category of “maybe” for those countries. Perhaps surprisingly, less than 20 percent of the world’s countries have prohibited by legislation the use of corporal punishment either as a sentence for a crime or for use in prison discipline. Like the death pen- alty, our classifi cation of the availability of corporal punishment is “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe.” The world use of corporal punishment is presented in Map 4: Cor- poral Punishment around the World. Regions of the Four Volumes The four volumes are broken up into the following regions: Volume 1: Africa and the Middle East Volume 2: The Americas Volume 3: Asia and Pacifi c Volume 4: Europe There are any number of ways to classify countries into regions of the world. We have mostly relied on a geographical classifi cation based on the United Na- tions Statistics Division classifi cation system (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/ default.htm). But this method is far from satisfactory. Although geography (rela- tively speaking) remains the same, the borders of countries do not, mostly as a result of political confl ict and other factors such as migration. Furthermore, the defi nition of what makes a country a country is also very diffi cult because there are many instances where “principalities” (e.g., San Marino) and “independent nations” (e.g., the Navajo Nation in the United States) exist inside larger nations or countries. The complex histories of colonialism and migration have resulted in particular countries containing a vast variety of peoples, cultures, and social ar- rangements, such that calling them a “country” or even “nation” gives a mislead- ing impression of a cohesive national system governed by one set of laws. Bosnia and Herzogovina are perhaps a prime recent example of this diffi culty. Given the shifting boundaries and defi nitions of countries and the social, cul- tural, and political diversity contained in them, allocating such countries to broad regions of the world is obviously even less precise. The fi nal allocation of coun- tries that were hard to classify—Turkey, for example—was admittedly somewhat arbitrary. We fi nally placed Turkey, along with Georgia, in Asia, not Europe. And we located countries of the Middle East (itself a very diffi cult region to defi ne in both geographical and political terms) along with Africa in Volume 1. A number of the countries classifi ed in the Middle Eastern region could just
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